Friday, February 13, 2009

Here' s question: is Morrissey any good? I ask because he has a new album out - lyrics 'so horribly sour you could make cottage cheese by leaving a pint of milk next to the speakers' - and because I have absolutely no idea whether he is any good. In fact, I've never listened to a whole Morrissey song and what fragments I have heard were merely overheard. He is a void in my pop cultural awareness. There are many such voids, of course, but none seem quite so gaping as Morrissey. I must, in the eighties, have been doing something else. Perhaps I was happy - I gather that disqualifies one from liking Morrissey.

13 comments:

No he isn't, he produces and endless stream of boring bland tunless music and combines it with an irritating persona and a large dose of self importance. I have always found his popularity inexplicable particularly as people who like him tend to have very similar taste to me apart from that.

you've made this mistake before! he's enjoyed by millions therefore he must be of some good. however, I think he's proof that The Smiths was significantly greater than the sum of its parts. You'd have to be miserable not to like them just a little bit.

Must admit I never got the Smiths at all. I think I must just have been too Southern, three or four years too old (makes a difference in your twenties), and too unimaginatively heterosexual …

But isn't there something unique about 80s music generally --- in that most of it sounds just as horrible now as it did at the time? On the whole, time is remarkably kind to pop music --- more so than to most of the other arts, I'd venture. Even the most ephemeral-seeming 60s bubblegum seems to have acquired a monumental quality over the years, a quite inexplicable gravitas (Dylan pins this down in an interview somewhere). Same has begun to happen to the really cheesy 1970s stuff – Abba, of course, but also the Carpenters (for God's sake), even disco and prog. This could be put down to nostalgia but I'd rather go all Blakean and say it's something to do with Eternity being in love with the productions of Time. But even Eternity couldn’t love the productions of that decade.

Nobody in pop has better understood the tragic figure of the intelligent teenager.

You say : "'Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn"And you claim these words as your own But I've read well, and I've heard them said A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more) If you must write prose/poems The words you use should be your own Don't plagiarise or take "on loan" 'Cause there's always someone, somewhere With a big nose, who knows And who trips you up and laughs When you fall Who'll trip you up and laugh When you fall

You say : "'Ere long done do does did"Words which could only be your own And then produce the text From whence t'was ripped (Some dizzy whore, 1804)

Now that's Eternal, because intelligent teenagers will always be tragic.

The process by which we end up listening to music is threefold, accidentally heard wherever, we buy it in CD form or as a visit to a performance, or as a parent given not much choice by miscellaneous sprogs.The Smiths fall into the third category. I went through three phases, "who the hell are this lot?" then "hey they ain't half bad" followed by "these people really have something to say."I went through the same learning curve with punk.

The Smiths and Morrissey's early solo work were excellent proper pop music but since the mid 1990's his work's been pretty hit and miss.His music is apparently very popular with young latino men in California, this pleases me for some reason.

Oh no. I love Morrissey and was hoping he'd found... oh never mind. Agree with Stephen's comment. Johnny gave him the music and then he wrote the words. Perhaps more expressive music would spark more wit and charm. From the Radcliffe and Maconie concert This Charming Man sounded beautiful, despite no jangly guitar, and I welled even as a retrospective Smiths fan. I haven't given up hope because when it all works no one else comes close. It's personal, like it is for everyone.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.